Booster! Photo App Lets You Add Live, Custom Effects As You Shoot

You probably love Instagram filters, and all the other image-tweaking filters in the myriad apps available for your iPhone. But no matter how many you try, they are all just presets.

What if you could make your own presets instead? That’s the promise of Booster!, an iPhone 4/s (or iPad 3 if you don’t mind pixel-doubling) photo app with infinitely changeable live filter effects.

Booster! is from the same developer as the polished iPhoneography apps ClassicINSTA, B&W Lab and others, and should hopefully be in the App Store soon (where it’ll cost a dollar). To use it, you tap the tabs along the bottom to pick between curves, saturation and other adjustments, vignette, white balance and (of course) a bunch of ready-made presets.

The interface looks to be very intuitive and touch-friendly, all draggable graphs and circular phone-dial menus. But the point of the app is to make and tweak the filters before you take the photo.

The advantages are many. First, you have less photos taking up space on your iPhone – no “before” and “after” to store. But more important is that you can tailor the photo to get the effect you want instead of trying to wrangle it afterwads.

For instance, say you want a contrasty, moody B&W portrait with a heavy vignette highlighting just the subject’s gnarled face. With Booster! you can set these parameters and then line up the picture and tweak the exposure as you shoot in order to get the effect you want.

It sounds pretty neat.

The app uses the full power of the iPhone 4S to do its live work, and will save pictures at full resolution. You can also use the iPhone 4, but the maximum size for saved images is 1530×2048, which means you lose around 2MP in the process.

I can’t wait until it pops up in the store, as it sounds like a great way to inspire some new creative photography if you’re feeling a little stale.